It’s the next installment of my Barrelhouse column, Learn To Write From the Movies. This time it’s about the movie Genius.

Genius is a 2016 movie about Thomas Wolfe, who wrote Look Homeward, Angel, and his editor, Maxwell Perkins. The movie is about the time Perkins, played by Colin Firth, edited Wolfe’s 11,000-page novel for him and it became a bestseller. Wolfe is played by Jude Law, who’s doing the same Southern accent he did in Cold Mountain and also the same accent that Foghorn Leghorn does in Looney Tunes. At one point, he says, “Damn,” and it sounds like “Dah-yham.” I tried to find out if Wolfe talked like Foghorn Leghorn, but the closest I could find was a recording of Wolfe’s mother, who had a slight Southern drawl. I’ll give Jude Law the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he knows something I don’t.

ON FEBRUARY 9, 1963, two days before the poet Sylvia Plath killed herself, a radio play about her marriage aired on the BBC. Difficulties of a Bridegroom was written by her husband, Ted Hughes, and was about a man rejecting his bride in favor of his mistress. The play aired twice, in January and February, and was heard by all of literary London — including Plath herself.

Welcome to a column where we learn how to become the sexy intellectual rock stars that Hollywood says all writers should be. In movies, writers scribble in garrets near trashcans overflowing with crumpled paper or swill liquor while typing on typewriters. So far, my writing life has none of these things. I don’t even own a quill. When you think about it, movies about writers are like graduate-level workshops, only you can get drunk during them without anyone yelling at you. Why practice the tedium of daily writing when you can study the greatest writers in the world as portrayed by actors in their Hollywood biopics? Let’s learn.

The first column is about Cross Creek, a movie about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings as portrayed by Mary Steenburgen. She was angry a lot.

In 2000, the Audio Engineering Society’s (AES) women in audio committee—which is now, tellingly, defunct—loosely estimated that 5 percent of those working in the field were female. A 2016 survey by AES found 7 percent of its members were women, though that number is incomplete because participants could opt out of reporting their gender. According to Women’s Audio Mission (WAM), a nonprofit that trains women for sound careers, that number is probably lower. With men holding the vast majority of technical jobs in audio, it follows that virtually all the music we hear—on the radio, over headphones, or in a live venue—has been shaped by a man.

Did you know the mob forced Davis into a sham marriage to a black woman after he was caught dating Kim Novak? Or that his marriage to Swedish actress May Britt was so controversial that JFK uninvited him to the 1960 inauguration? Or that he was friends and a supporter of Martin Luther King Jr.?

Fun fact: Isadora Duncan and Jack London were contemporaries. Both were born in San Francisco, in 1877 and 1876, respectively. Both experienced poverty-stricken childhoods in Oakland and went on to make definitive marks on their art forms — London in fiction, Duncan in dance. Both lived dramatic lives full of travel, alcohol, and socialist politics.

And both died young — London in 1916 at age 40, from kidney failure; Duncan in 1927 at age 49, famously in a car accident. The long red scarf she was wearing tangled in the hubcap of a moving car. Her neck was broken.

Beatrix Potter is known for her gentle children’s books and beautiful illustrations. But the sweet stories of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck and others helped hide a savvy mind for business—and an author who was among the first to realize that her readers could help build a business empire.